Decision-making Under Acute Stress

Many decisions must be made under stress,and many decision situations elicit stress responses themselves.Thus,stress and decision making are intricately connected,and became widely concerned in recent years.Human's choice behavior is governed by dual-learning systems,namely,reflective,“cognitive” or reflexive,“habitual” system.The former is performed automatically,responds quickly and does not consume cognitive resources.The latter responds slowly and consumes more cognitive resources,but it is also more flexible and sensitive to the changes in the external environment.Both of these learning systems exist in parallel and compete with each other to jointly influence people's mind and behavior.Existing research shows that noradrenaline and glucocorticoids act through mineralocorticoid receptors and exert interactive impact on brain regions that subserve dual-learning systems,and thereafter change individual's decision-making.In addition,personal decision and the quality of it can be influenced by other people.Previous studies have involved more private decision-making context,however,evidence on the effect of stress in social decision-making is limited.In experiment 1 we adopt Socially Evaluated Cold Pressure Test to arouse acute stress and measure subjective and physiological responses to stress.Participants perform particular decision task when salivary cortisol levels stay at peak.This enabled us to examine whether and how individuals evaluate the expected and realized outcome of their action under the steady neuroendocrine influence of acute stress exposure.In experiment 1,we found that expected value(e),risk variance(v),and anticipatory regret(r)have influence on choice behavior.Critically,we observed that stressed participants exhibited extreme emotional responses to both the obtained in rating 2 and counterfactual outcomes.By fitting a computational model to participants' wheel choices,we found that this overexpression of negative emotion in stressed participants was coupled with an increase utilization of anticipated regret in guiding choice behavior.This exaggerated avoidance of regret was driven by those participants who experienced a larger increase in cortisol concentrations in response to the stress manipulation.In experiment 2 we add social context to the private context,that is,making participants choose the lotteries together with counterparts.As participants can see the choice and outcome of counterparts,it allows us to understand whether and how stress influence individuals' behavior through social comparison.In experiment 2,we found that all participants in the stress and control group exhibit negative emotion when loss and positive emotion when gain.Both in private and social context,when faced with lose,stress potentiates participants negative affective response.Mixeddesigned anova on rating in the SDC+(social gains)and SDC-(social loss)outcome context revealed that individuals appear more aversive in SDC-context relative to SDC+ context,in accordance with loss aversion theory.Meanwhile,acute stress potentiates this phenomenon in our experiment.Logistic regression analyses showed that all participants chose by maximizing expected value and were moderate risk-seeking.When faced with prudent counterpart,participants in stress adopt a more risky and dominant behavior,while those in control group show moderate risk-taking;when faced with bold competitor,stressed participants become weaker and keep risk-neutral,on the contrary,control participants show relatively high risktaking.These results demonstrated that acute stress may play a prominent role in social comparison.In summary,our findings to some extend confirm that stress bias decision-making toward reflexive system control.In addition,stress modulates emotional responses and the ability to guide choice behavior.Lastly,risk attitude is not only influenced by counterpart's choice behavior,but also modulated by stress condition.Study on decision-making under stress may help deepen our understandings on the relationship between stress and decision-making,and is helpful to provide theoretical guidance for personal or public management in terms of pressure and choice problem.